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A few months ago, she started volunteering with a program that provides food and other resources to unhoused people in downtown St. Louis. Some live in shelters, others on the street.

My wife and a friend of hers befriended a couple trying to navigate their way to housing. They came here from Joplin and fell on hard times. They battle addiction.

At some point, the husband had an overdose and ended up at the hospital. He couldn’t go back to the shelter where he had been staying. Instead, he was dropped off in a cab near a shelter. He ended up on the streets again. Phones got turned off or lost. Now he’s gone with the wind.

The dejection of losing touch with the couple was hard for my wife to take.

But what happened to that couple, Anthony D’Agostino says, is repeated often because the system for the unsheltered population in St. Louis is broken. D’Agostino is the CEO of Peter & Paul Community Services, one of the biggest nonprofit providers of shelter, housing and case management in the region. He’s also the chairman of the , the umbrella organization of nonprofits and government officials that are supposed to devise a system to provide housing for people who need it.

Too often the system fails, D’Agostino says, because there’s a clog in the pipeline.

“There is not a week that goes by that St. Patrick’s or Peter & Paul or some other shelter has a cab just show up with somebody in a wheelchair and just drops them off,� D’Agostino says.

One of the reasons for that problem — people who have no place to go after being discharged from the hospital — is because St. Louis is that doesn’t have an emergency respite care facility.

The Rev. Kelli A. Braggs aims to fix that. Braggs is executive director of Bridge of Hope, a faith-based nonprofit in The Ville neighborhood. For much of its existence, Bridge of Hope has been a jack-of-all-trades, offering a day shelter, showers, laundry, bicycles and other services to help folks who live on the streets manage their lives.

Not long after Braggs took over in 2020, she realized that she was seeing the same people over and over again. She and her board set out to find a better niche for the organization, providing services that helped reduce long-term homelessness.

“How do we help our clients graduate?� she wondered.

That’s when she found out that St. Louis needed a medical respite center — a place where people in the hospital for an overdose, mental health issue or surgery could recover after being released so they don’t land back on the street. And during that recovery, case management can place them into the appropriate shelter or housing program so they advance through and, eventually out of, the system.

Braggs describes the same situation D’Agostino has seen. “Every day when I would show up at Bridge of Hope, there would be somebody waiting at the door,� she says.

The people often had a medical bracelet or some other sign of having recently come from the hospital. “They had nowhere to go,� she says. “This is a real need.�

And it’s not just hospitals and shelters that are paying the price. Increasingly, local jails are holding people who are brought there mostly because they need mental health care.

“We are locking people up because they went on a mental break,� Braggs says. “They are holding them because there is nowhere else to go.�

Bridge of Hope is remodeling its facility in the old Williams School to turn itself into a respite facility with 40 beds. Braggs, who just joined the board of the Continuum of Care, is working with hospitals and other nonprofits to make sure Bridge of Hope can fill a need — and not end up as another overcrowded place failing to “graduate� clients to the next step.

In her short time in the nonprofit world, she’s seen how fragmentation affects the system. It’s why D’Agostino and other leaders have pushed to have the nonprofit take over from the city as the conduit for handing out federal money and coordinating services. The idea is to remake the system so that all of it works together. It’s not that the city isn’t working hard on issues surrounding homelessness; it’s that the nature of bureaucracy makes it hard to work at the pace necessary to get things done.

Braggs believes her organization’s plan can be a big part of improving the services in St. Louis. She’s not alone.

“If we have a system that communicates well across all providers, and is able to shift people based on need, this should have a significant impact,� D’Agostino says. “We haven’t been able to get everybody on board to a point where we’re all rowing in the same direction. We need that to happen.�